The Student Protests Roiling South Africa

Students and others march in Johannesburg during a Fees Must Fall protest.

Photograph by MARCO LONGARI / AFP / Getty

One afternoon last week, I went to the supermarket near my flat in Cape Town. The shop was almost empty, and as I stood and dithered over different kinds of spaghetti I could hear a woman and her friend in the next aisle discussing the protests. For nearly a year, students at many of South Africa’s public universities had been rallying against proposed national tuition hikes. The demonstrations had recently intensified, and the focus had shifted. Fee increases were no longer the issue; the protesters now demanded higher education that was both free and decolonized—scrubbed of its apartheid-era European bias. Campuses across the country, including the University of Cape Town (U.C.T.), were shut down. It seemed to be all people could talk about.

The women sounded broadly sympathetic to the protesters, and about the hand that poor black people in this country have been dealt. It was terrible, they agreed. When they came around the corner, near the dairy section, I saw that two small girls, both white, were trailing behind them. The girls were dressed in the uniform of a nearby private school—stiff blue dresses with big Peter Pan collars, little white socks. The woman who had been speaking most gestured to them. She was glad, she said, that her girls were young, and that this wasn’t their problem. She felt sorry for parents whose children were at university this year, but she was so glad it wasn’t going to be an issue for her girls. She seemed perfectly sure that this was all going to blow over soon, that things would go back to the way they had been. The academic year would be completed somehow. A new batch of students would be admitted. There just wasn’t any alternative.

On South African campuses, though, things don’t look so simple. Since September, the country has been inundated with images of protesters throwing rocks and of police marching in formation, university buildings being set alight and vehicles being torched. Two weeks ago, security guards discovered twelve petrol bombs in a student residence at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Last Monday, a chaplain at the University of the Witwatersrand, commonly known as Wits, was shot in the face with a rubber bullet as he stood in front of an armored vehicle. On Friday, the vice-chancellor of U.C.T. reported being assaulted by a protester. Altogether, more than five hundred students have been arrested, and there are reports of serious injuries, including of women being dragged by their hair into police vans. The use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, and stun grenades is now routine. The protesters have been accused of wanting to engineer “their own Marikana,” a reference to the massacre at the Lonmin platinum mine, in 2012, in which police killed thirty-four miners who were participating in a strike, setting off a rash of national demonstrations and walkouts. Both sides have explicitly disavowed violence, but law enforcement has seemed eager to lay the blame at protesters’ feet. On October 6th, at a televised press conference held to address the situation at Wits, which the student leader Fasiha Hassan had recently described as “Armageddon,” Khomotso Phahlane, the acting commissioner of the South African Police Service, issued the following statement: “It can never be the agenda of any student who is seeking free education to provoke the police with the intention of getting to that point where there are people killed.” Phahlane and his colleagues, he added, “will continue to disappoint” such agitators.

Disparities between what is said and what is done continue to widen. I have read that the protesters are peaceful and unarmed, and that they are “marauding barbarians”; that the damage done to institutions across the country amounts to more than seventy million dollars, and that it amounts to less than half of that; that the student body is united, and that it is divided along starkly racial lines; that the academic year must be completed, and that it cannot possibly be completed; that the movement is leaderless, and that it is well-organized; that the demonstrations are a manifestation of civic crisis, or economic crisis, or the overweening entitlement of youth. Consensus is hard to come by, but what seems clear is that circumstances have been inflamed by a larger national crisis—the protracted unravelling of the country’s governing party, the African National Congress. After years of financial mismanagement and a series of corruption scandals, the A.N.C. seems unable to come up with a coherent and unified response to the fees crisis and what it represents on a broader scale: the state’s failure to redress the devastating imbalances wrought by apartheid.

These are the few facts that most people seem to agree on, and then there is everything else. Debate extends even to the subject of when the crisis began. Do its roots stretch back to 1953, the year the Bantu Education Act was passed, enforcing racially segregated education and insuring that black students would receive a dramatically inferior education? Or does it make sense to go all the way back to 1652, the year the Cape became a Dutch colony? For the sake of clarity, let’s say the movement began in October of 2015, when Wits announced a fee increase of 10.5 per cent for the following academic year. The university justified the change on economic grounds, pointing to rising inflation and declining government funding for higher education. Protests started there, under the banner of Fees Must Fall, and spread. Students at historically black universities had been resisting annual tuition increases for years, but now their complaints were adopted by their peers at Wits, U.C.T., and Rhodes, all historically white and well-heeled—the South African equivalent of the Ivy League. The new fees, the protesters argued, would put a university education out of the reach of many black students, who were only barely able to reach it in the first place.

As Fees Must Fall gained momentum, so did public sympathy and support. The protests now threatened the successful conclusion of the 2015 academic year, which prompted President Jacob Zuma to announce that there would be no fee increase after all. It was a temporary solution, paid for with emergency government funds, and was designed to get students back into classes. The problem rolled over into 2016. Then, in time-honored South African tradition, the A.N.C. established a commission of inquiry, inviting submissions from all stakeholders, including students, as it looked into the feasibility of free education. The commission is expected to release its recommendations in July, 2017. In the meantime, the government has put forward another interim solution; it insures that poor students will continue to get scholarships and loans, and that students from working- and middle-class families who are not eligible for government loans will pay a smaller tuition increase than their well-off peers. But these concessions, announced in September—almost a year after the protests began, and just as students were preparing for final exams—weren’t enough. Fees Must Fall now demanded free, decolonized education for all.

The universities have responded by saying that they simply don’t have the money. They have suggested that the students need to direct their anger and energy toward the state, the primary funder of higher education and the only body capable of solving the problem. But the state continues to waver and prevaricate. Last Tuesday, Zuma established a task force to “normalize” the situation at the universities. It is made up of the so-called security cluster—the ministers of defense, justice, state security, police, and home affairs—plus the ministers of finance and higher education. Recent systematic arrests of high-profile student protesters, and the use of apartheid-era tactics (apprehending students in their dorm rooms at night, for instance), suggest that a hard-line law-and-order approach is going to take precedence over negotiation. All sides seem increasingly unwilling to inhabit the same reality.

Last Monday night, I sat in on a Fees Must Fall meeting at U.C.T., where I am a student. A group of protest leaders addressed an auditorium of about two hundred people, reporting back on the latest round of talks with the university administration. “We have to complete this year knowing that there is no child in the future who cannot access education because he is poor, or because he is black,” one the leaders, Masixole Mlandu, said. “Free, decolonized education has to happen, is going to happen.” But the state, it appears, disagreed. Ten days later, Mlandu was arrested on charges of intimidation and taken to Pollsmoor, one of the most notorious prisons in South Africa. (Nelson Mandela was held there for several years after being transferred from Robben Island.) He has recently been released on bail, but the protests triggered by his arrest continue.

This is a developing story, and here is one more part to it, one more place to begin. Last year, a big group of U.C.T. students gathered to watch a statue of Cecil John Rhodes—the nineteenth-century diamond magnate, creator of the Rhodes Scholarships, and outspoken British imperialist and white supremacist—be removed from campus. After a month of protests, this time under the banner of Rhodes Must Fall, the U.C.T. administration had acknowledged what students were saying—that the statue represented the university’s institutional racism, its foundations on the back of black suffering and pain. It was a late-April afternoon and hot. There were camera drones above our heads, photographers everywhere, student leaders speaking, sometimes indecipherably, through bullhorns, as we all stood there waiting for something to happen. Then, suddenly, the statue was in the air, swinging in the grip of a crane. What I remember feeling first was utter surprise. We all knew that it was going to be removed; there was no alternative. But I had walked past that statue for years, had stopped noticing it as anything other than part of the landscape. It was there, and then it was gone.

A statue is one thing, and an institution is another. One can be toppled by force, can be lifted swinging into the air, while the other seems destined to stand forever. But, when Rhodes was loaded into the back of a flatbed truck and carted away, it seemed that something impossible had been achieved. Looking at the empty space where the statue had stood, it was incredible to think that it had ever existed at all.